Distance to the Sun

The Strange Sound That The Sun Makes
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13 years for sound to travel from the Sun to the Earth, if sound could travel in space! Kind of puts that distance in a different light.

Are his numbers correct? Let's check. The sun is 93 million miles away, which translates into about 8 minutes at the speed of light. Since light travels at about one foot per nanosecond, we get:

Time for light to travel from the Sun to Earth		8		minutes
	times	60		seconds	per minute
	times	1	billion	nanoseconds	per second
	equals	480	billion	nanoseconds
	divided by	1		nanosecond	per foot
Distance to the Sun	equals	480	billion	feet
	divided by	5,280		feet	per mile
Distance to the Sun	equals	90	million	miles

My 90 million mile distance is not bad considering I started with 8 minutes which is not a precise time. Now we calculate how long sound would take to travel that distance:

Distance to the Sun	take	480	billion	feet
Speed of sound	divide by	1,125		feet	per second
	equals	427	million	seconds
	divided by	22,791,600		seconds	per year
Time for sound to travel from Sun to Earth	equals	14		years

The difference between his time of 13 years and my time of 14 years can be easily explained by the different temperatures when measuring the speed of sound.

Spreadsheet here.

Slice of Pie

Slice of Pie Graph

Poking around on YouTube this morning and I noticed a video about taking progressively larger slices of pie and the question was which slice would be the largest? You start by taking a slice that is one percent of the whole pie, and then you take two percent of the remaining pie, and then three percent of what's left all the way up to one hundred. I couldn't come up with an equation that I could graph on Desmos, so off to the spreadsheet I go. Only had to make three little equations and then copy and paste to fill the rest of the sheet.

The size of the slice (the yellow line) goes up until you get to 10%. That's when you get the largest piece of pie. After that each slice gets progressively smaller. By the time you have reached the 35th slice, all that's left is 1/1000th of the whole pie.

Never did watch the video. Went back and looked for it but could not find it. Funny how I was able to get the whole problem from a one line blurb, but it took me a paragraph to explain it.

Heater Repair, Revised

Heater Controls

Last November I took the Mitsubishi to the mechanic to get the heater fixed. The first problem was the controller so I bought a couple of used control panels off of E-Bay. Took them into the shop and find they are the wrong parts. What it needs is new actuators that CONTROL the flapper valves in the heater box. So I order a couple of actuators and find they don't fit. The old, defunct actuator has a seven pin electrical connector and one of the new ones has five pins and the other has three pins. Wonderful. Search the internet and find nothing. Find a list of junk yards and start calling. I called a dozen and found nothing. I even posted a note on the national junk yard board but got no reply.

Actuator Internals
All the lines on the gear wheel are wear marks, there are actually only three wide lines of conductive paint.

Okay, let's take a look at this actuator and see what's going on. Open it up and I find a small electric motor turning a gear train. That part looks simple enough, but why do we have seven pins? Take out the big gear and I find some some brass brushes that contact the underside of the big gear. There is a spiral of something on the gear. It looks kind of erratic and my immediate impression is that it is some kind of pattern that encodes the position of the wheel.

Circuit Scribe Conductive Ink Pen

I take it to lunch and confer with my cronies and Jack suggests that it is resistive paint. The erratic pattern is simply where the paint has worn off. So I order a conduction paint pen and fill in the worn spots and put it back together. Put it back in the car and it seems to be working okay.

Electrical Testing

Test Leads Kit

Before I got to the paint, I thought I would see if one of the other actuators could be made to work. They all used the same case and the same drive shaft, just the electrical connectors were different. Though mine has seven pins it only uses five. Looking inside the 5-pin actuator, it seems to be very similar, so I thought to hook it up to a meter and see how it behaved. I have a collection of test leads, but none that were small enough to connect to these pins, so I bought a kit. Still had to drill holes in the shell surrounding the connector on the actuator, but I got them all connected. Hooked them up to the meter and a battery from a drill, and ran the actuator through it's whole range of motion. The resistance on the original actuator ran from zero up to 8K ohms, on the new actuator it varied from 0 to 6K ohms. Six is almost the same as 8, right? Or so I reasoned. I tried it but it would not go through it's full range of motion, so we're back to the original.

Lever Wire Nuts

I cut the wires to conduct that test, so now I need to reconnect them. I found these little lever action connectors on Amazon. They worked very well. They are just a little over an inch long, so they fit in the available space.

Mounting Screws

The two screws that were holding the actuator in place had gone missing, so I looked through my collection of screws and found a couple that seemed to be just right, except they were just a fraction of an inch two long. I used a couple of nuts as spacers and they worked fine.

The screws are like sheet metal screws, so anything that was approximately the same size would of worked, except one of the screws was buried way back in the dash so getting any kind of driver in there was difficult. So I wanted a screw that was as near to correct as I could find.

Right side underdash panel

The actuator wasn't hard to get to in spite of being buried in the dashboard. Just pull out the glove box which is held in place with four screws that are easy to get to. I ran into a little problem when I was putting in the screws holding the actuator. I was using a little screwdriver bit about two inches long to get one of the screws started and I dropped it and it disappears. Bah. There is a panel on the underside of the dash that is held in place with another four screws. Take those out, the panel comes out and there's my screwdriver bit. Get the actuator installed and now we have to put that underdash panel back in. This is a real struggle. With the panel in place you can't see where the screws go, and I can't get my head in the footwell far enough to see anything. I probably spent an hour getting those four screws into their holes.

Expenses:

Date	Item	Vendor	Amount
Nov. 22, 2023	Control Panel	Ebay	125.00
Nov. 22, 2023	Control Panel	Ebay	68.99
Dec 4, 2023	Actuator	Puente Hills Mitsubishi	141.45
Jan 19, 2024	Actuator	Amazon	24.99
Feb 5, 2024	Test Leads	Amazon	20.99
Mar 2, 2024	Connectors	Amazon	9.99
Mar 8, 2024	Paint	Amazon	15.49
	Total		406.90

I could have returned some of those parts, but I fumbled around and now it's probably too late.

I also paid the mechanic $300, but he did some other work, so maybe $100 went to investigating the heater problem. It was kind of a drag spending $400 on stuff I didn't need, but I was able to put off buying a new car for at least a year. Maybe ten. We won't count all the time it was out of service. Fortunately the Hyundai had returned so we still had two working vehicles.

Notes: 

• I started this post on March 15, 2024. Then I got distracted, but now I've finished it.
• I've tried several different ways of including a table in a blog post but none of them worked very well. Today I thought I would just try copying the data from the spreadsheet and pasting them here and it worked very well. Just highlight the rectangular area you want and press Control-C to copy it, move over to the blog and press Control-V. Worked very well.

Maserati Mostro

2016 Maserati Mostro

This Maserati is a real Italian hot rod. They built five of them to celebrate Maserati's 100th year anniversary. The company was founded by five brothers sometime around 1920. A couple of those brothers lived very long lives. Some of them didn't.

Seconds

I am still reading A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge. I'm kind of slow, I read maybe a chapter a day, which I feel is about ten pages. It's a big book, and there's lots of chapters, so it's taking me a while.

Throughout the book Vern tells time by the number of seconds, be it hundred or a thousand or a million. I'm comfortable with numbers, so I can generally figure out the amount of time we are talking about. Unfortunately I never remember those values so every time I run into a time, if I care about the amount of time, I have to do those calculations again. I wanted a scale that had both our conventional times and Vern's base-10 devoted system. It would need to be a logarithmic scale in order to accommodate all of our values. So I went prowling the net - and found bupkis. I did find one suggestion on how it might be done in javascript and html, but that's a lot of work, and I've already got a stack of obscure stuff to wade through. So I just compiled a list to see what I'm dealing with.

Some useful approximations:

• One thousand seconds, a Ksec, is about a quarter of an hour.
• One hundred thousand seconds is a little more than a day, 
• a million seconds is like a week and a half, 
• two and half million makes a month
• 30 million makes a year
• 300 million makes a decade
• 3 billion makes a century
• 30 billion makes a millenium

P. S. The list at the top is an embedded Google spreadsheet. I'm not sure whether embedding a list from a spreadsheet is worthwhile. It's great if that spreadsheet is going to get updated. If that happens, the blog post will show the new stuff, but I don't think that's going to happen here. The problem with embedding the spreadsheet is having to manually adjust the height and width parameters to show all of the data and nothing else. As you can see, there is still some white space on the right side and the bottom. I probably went back and forth a dozen times between the html and Blogger's preview. Pain in the neck. The other way is to just take a screenshot and embed it as an image. That has its own set of hoops to jump through, but I am familiar with them.

P. P. S. Kind of funny that everyone uses the same time standard of seconds, minutes and hours. The second is kind of universal - it's a heartbeat. The minutes and hours part though, I wonder where it came from. I suspect it came from European clock makers during the Renaissance (Bayou, I'm looking at you), but who knows? Maybe they got it from Chinese clock makers a zillion years ago. Someone should investigate.

P. P. P. S. Editing a spreadsheet to get it to 'look' like you want takes me a lot of fiddling around, but Google does offer lots of options. I know how to find most of what I want, changes appear immediately, you don't have to go look at a 'preview', and it's useful for things besides lists.

More Fun with Numbers

I've been kicking this idea around for a while, and I should probably put some numbers to it and see if it's even feasible.

The basic idea is to use a linear accelerator to launch a stream of iron particles at very high velocities, like half the speed of light, and use that to generate thrust to propel a spaceship. A little fooling with the rocket equation shows that with an exhaust velocity that high you should easily be able to reach the speed of light. The rocket equation doesn't take relativity into account, but the Newtonian math at least  sounds promising.

If you were to accelerate at one gravity for one year you would reach the speed of light, at least in Newtons universe. So boost for one year, coast for two or three, turn around and use your particle beam thruster to slow down till you reach Alpha Centauri. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

There are all kinds of problems with this idea, but the first one that came to me is the reaction mass. How many tons of iron particles would you need? I dunno, how about a million? Suppose you got your reaction mass in BBs, how many BBs would you need? And how fast would you need to feed them into your particle accelerator?

To the Bat-sheet, Robin. I took the idea I used last time and expanded it to use named variables. It makes it a little cumbersome to display in Bloggers narrow format, but we'll give it a try.

Link to Spreadsheet

As you can see, that stream of BBs would need to be flying into order to shoot the entire one million tons worth in one year. Even if we were to draw it out to ten years, it would still be traveling at rifle bullet speeds. Perhaps we should look at using cannonballs instead of BBs.

Naming all the constants was a little annoying, but I think it makes it easier to understand and verify.

P.S. I need to start putting disclaimers on the draft versions of my posts. You start embedding things and Blogger's preview function doesn't always cooperate, so in order to see what it's going to look like, you have to publish it. We'll see if I remember next time.

Fun with Numbers

I've been playing with some formulas and numbers having to do with rockets. The math isn't a problem, but there are a dozen steps or so that I need to take to get to the result. I can put the numbers and formulas into a spreadsheet, but once the formula is entered it disappears and only the result shows.

What I want is a system where I can see the formulas and the values and be reasonably certain that the I have implemented the formula correctly. Also, I want to be able to show the spreadsheet to other people and have it clear enough that they can follow along and will either be assured that the numbers and formulas are implemented correctly or they will be able to point out any errors.

Google must be watching over me. FORMULATEXT might be just what I need.

Here is a trial spreadsheet to see how well this works. The blue cells contain formulas that use the the content of other cells. The light yellow ones are for input values.

Each number that goes into this calculation has a value and associated units.

UKRAINE SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2022

UKRAINE SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2022

I'm reading about the end of the world and the author mentions that the US Congress has appropriated $13.6 billion to assist Ukraine against the Russian invasion. $13.6 billion is a chunk of money, it's one percent of a trillion dollars, and you know that old saw, a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. So I checked and I found this which kind of sounds like it might be true.

I'm reading through it and like all government bureaucratese, it contains a bunch of facts, but they are all piled together higgledy-piggledy. It's a little tough to make sense of when billion dollar allocations are given the same billing as million dollar allocations, so I put the numbers in a spreadsheet and graphed the result. May you enjoy the picture I have painted.

You might notice that the total of the amounts listed is $16.6 billion, not the $13.6 billion in the title. That's because I included this item:

Increased Authorities – The legislation includes $3 billion in authority to drawdown defense articles and services and increased flexibility to transfer excess defense equipment for Ukraine and other regional allies.

I don't know exactly what that means, but it sure sounds like another $3 billion for Ukraine. 

P.S. I'm always looking for ways to automatically format data the way I want it. Today I figured out that it you change  millions to *10^6,  billions to *10^9 and $ to =, you can change dollar amounts like $13.6 billion to pure numbers.

Vikings: Valhalla

Vikings: Valhalla | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Historical drama set in England with a bunch of historical characters including Leif Erikson and Æthelred the Unready. It starts with:

The St. Brice's Day massacre was the killing of Danes on the 13th of November 1002, ordered by King Æthelred the Unready of England in response to frequent Danish raids. - Wikipedia

I remember hearing about Leif Erikson when I was in school about a zillion years ago, and Æthelred the Unready, that's a name that sticks in the memory. 

His epithet does not derive from the modern word "unready", but rather from the Old English unræd meaning "poorly advised"; it is a pun on his name, which means "well advised". - Wikipedia

Danes had been living in England for a long time. The English noblemen advised the King to exterminate them. Not everyone thought this was a good idea as they suspected this would enrage the Vikings and they would want revenge and that's just what happened. That's my quick guess as to the origin of his nickname.

This show is like a follow on to The Last Kingdom which starts in 877, and we've still got Normans, Saxons and Danes hacking on each other with swords and axes.

The production values are pretty good, meaning the clothing, weapons, boats and buildings all seem reasonable for the period. They do slip in a number of women and brown people into roles where you might not expect them, but who knows? This is hundreds of years after the Romans left and slavery is still a thing. Some people seem to get bent out of shape over this kind of thing, but it doesn't bother me. Sometimes having a black person in a drama really throws some light on the situation, like when we had a black person playing Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton.

Real historical characters from the show:

We even have some dates for some of them. The names in blue are links to Wikipedia which prove (prove) that they really, truly existed.  

Google spreadsheet here

Sporting Event Attendence

Not quite sure what got me started on this, but the numbers kind of surprised me. Baseball draws more spectators than anything else. College games draw more than professional sports. Motor sports draw a fraction of those.

What I was wondering were how many people are attend these games religiously. I'm guesstimating it's about half. Knowing how many season ticket holders there are would help, except that if the vibe isn't there, the entire high dollar section will be empty. 

If you look at the total, it seems like everyone in country must have attended a game. However, divide that by 100 (to adjust for multiple games in one season and fans who follow more than one sport) and you get 3 million which is roughly one percent of the people in this country. Funny, one percent is also the number of people who die in this country every year.

The people spend something like $50 billion on sporting events every year. Last year probably didn't measure up.

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)

A bunch of countries in east Asia are working on a free trade agreement. The people in these countries make up 30% of the world's population. 

I'm reading Tyler Durden's post about this and there is a chart of numbers and I don't like the format. The numbers are all left justified, makes it hard to see what's going on, so I muck around 

(save the image, run it through a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) service, edit with a text editor to clean it up a bit) 

and then import it into a spreadsheet. Now I can play with it. Lists of numbers like this call for a graph, but none of graphs I call into existence really show me anything useful. Then I realize what we need is GDP per person, so I add that column. Now we have some numbers that mean something.

The top five are no surprise. Number six, Brunei, is kind of a freak, a tiny country on the island of Borneo that just happens to be "the fourth-largest producer of oil in Southeast Asia". Then we have China, Malaysia and Thailand that seem to be doing okay. And then we have the bottom six, who maybe aren't doing so well. That the Philippines are below Vietnam was kind of surprise, but maybe not. Filipinos make up a third of the crews of most of the cruise ships in the world. Working on a cruise ship is not far from slave labor. If that many people are looking for slave labor gigs overseas, things can't be too good at home. Plus we've got a jihadist revolution percolating there.* 

Seems Capitalism worked in some of these countries (the top five again). A couple suffered Communist revolutions (China and Vietnam) and are making progress. You'd think that the Philippines would be doing better what with it being a mostly an English speaking, Christian country with strong US backing, but maybe that's the problem. South Vietnam's corrupt government had US backing as well.

* It took me a while to find this post. Searching for philippines missed it. Searching for philippine would have found it, but Blogger's search function is rudimentary at best and I didn't think of it. Searching for winning finally turned it up because I remembered that from the blurb I quoted.

P.S. The chart in Tyler Durden's post was an image of the chart in Visual Capitalist's post. The chart format in Visual Capitalist's post is still piss poor, but at least it was text, so I could have copied it directly instead of going through the OCR business.

Atomic Bomb Inventory

Atomic Bomb InventoryPlot is cumulative, the number along the left hand edge is the worldwide total.The blue area is the US stockpile, the red area is the Russian stockpile.The thick line along the top is everyone else.

I'm slowly making my way through Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. Back in the 1950's the US Military was actually afraid Russia / Stalin might start another war. Since we didn't want to support an army big enough to counter an attack by a Russian army (on account of big armies are expensive), we opted to build up our stockpile of atom bombs so we could have a big stick to threaten them with, i.e. if you attack Europe we will obliterate your country. And since Russia had developed their own atom bomb, they weren't going to the let the US have a bigger stick, so they built up their arsenal and that's how we ended up with a zillion atom bombs.

Cube Puzzle Solver Port-Mortem

Number of times search was blocked by level.

I modified my cube solver program to keep track of the number of times a search at each level failed. There are ten pieces to the puzzle, so we search at ten different levels, one level for each piece. The graph shows the number of times the search of all possible positions at that level did not find a single one that could hold the selected piece.

Levels 0 thru 4 don't even register above the X axis at this scale. Including them made the key confusing, there wasn't enough differentiation in the colors, so I didn't include them. Level 5 shows a flat line even though it has counts consistently above 10 billion (10^10). I included it just to give you an idea of the scale we are working with.

The program printed this data to stderr, which by default goes to the terminal screen. Copy and paste that into the text editor and then replace all instances of multiple spaces with a single tab. (Start with the longest sequence of spaces you can find and then work backwards.) The formatting is lost, but now you can copy and paste that into a spreadsheet and our formatting is restored.

I did some calculations in the spreadsheet to see how many comparison tests we avoided and came up with about 4.5 quadrillion, which is a very large number, but still nowhere near the value of 

12 * (3*96)^4 * (4*96)^5 = 6.8929848e+23

which is what I expected. So there is something wrong with my calculations somewhere.

P.S. Something weird happened when I pasted the text into the spreadsheet. I got a bunch of lines consisting of the single word #ERROR! I looked in my source code, but couldn't find it, and I just looked in the text file and it's not there either, so I think Google Sheets must have found something it didn't like (like a line of 300 periods) and complained. No problem, simple sort the file and all the ugly stuff you aren't interested in gets lumped together and can easily to erased.

P.P.S. One trick I use when dealing with large quantities of data is to insert a column along the left hand edge, a new column A if you will, and then number all of the lines with sequential numbers. You can easily do this by typing 1 in box A1, and then =A1+1 in box A2. Copy box A2, select all the rest of column A from A3 to the end paste. Now all the lines are numbered sequentially. However, you are not quite done. If you sort the sheet now, all the values in column A will be recomputed and your original order will be lost. So what you do is copy column A and the Paste Special -> Values Only back over it. Now you have an indelible original order. Sort however you like, but you can restore the original order by sorting on Column A.

Adding Time

Google can do all kinds of tricks from the search bar. It can convert most any kind of measurement to any other, like acres to square meters or liters to acre-feet. It can handle almost any kind of mathematical expression, like 2+2 or 975.035^0.5 (the caret (^) means raise to a power, a power of 0.5 means take the square root). It even has a timer function. Simply enter timer.

But it won't add time. Looking back over the 8 videos about the Hitachi excavator I wondered how much time I had spent. Being a numbers kind of guy, I could add them up myself, but I thought I would give Google's Spreadsheet a try.  Type the times in a text editor, one time per line, copy them, open a spreadsheet and paste and the numbers should all appear in a column. That part worked fine for me. If it doesn't for you it's probably because you forgot to sacrifice a potato to the gods of the copybook headings.

I tried adding the times using the sum function, but it didn't work. Digging around a bit I found that times can be formatted in a number of ways, and one of those is Duration. However, when I format the numbers that way, it turns my minutes and seconds into hours and minutes. Divide all my times by 60, store the results in an adjacent column, apply the sum function to that column, and presto: 1:18:40.

Actually, I could have just applied the sum function to the original times, it would work just as well. You just need to drop the :00 off the end to get 78:40.

You could type the numbers directly into the spreadsheet, but I like to use the text editor. I can use a small window for the text editor, put it in front of the browser window and I can usually position the text editor window somewhere that it doesn't obscure the stuff I want to copy. The spreadsheet had all kinds of headings and borders and stuff, so a minimum size window is still pretty big.

US Aircraft Carriers

USS Shangri-La Aboard the Aircraft Carrier USS Shangri-La, circa 1962, somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. From the film - Flying Clipper, (1962). With narration by Burl Ives.
The USA has been flying supersonic aircraft from carriers consistently for over 60 years. No one else's record comes anywhere close.

The Grumman F-11 Tiger was the first supersonic jet fighter to operate from an aircraft carrier. They started in 1956. Of the aircraft in the video, the Skyhawk is notable (in my mind) because Argentina had a bunch of them. The other jet fighter in the video is the F-8 Crusader. I seem to recall having a model of one when I was a kid. It wasn't a particularly good-looking aircraft, but it was certainly capable. John Glenn made the first super-sonic cross country flight in a Crusader in 1957. Along the way he refueled from propeller driven AJ Savage tankers. He would have had to slow down to hook up with the tankers since they weren't able to go that fast. I suspect no one has tried to perform in-flight refueling at super-sonic speeds.

The photo reconnaissance version of the Crusader was sent to take some pictures of the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis. The F-101 Voodoo was also sent. The Voodoo was a land based airplane and was not designed to work with aircraft carriers.

The Crusader had 'variable-incidence' wings, which means the wing was mounted on a pivot so that the angle of attack could be changed to make it possible for the pilot to see where he was going and allow the aircraft to fly slow enough to land on a carrier.

Watching the video, I noticed that right at the beginning of the catapult launch, a flap across the big air inlet under the nose opens up. Didn't find any explanation for it.


US Aircraft Carriers
At the start of WW2, we had eight aircraft carriers. During the course of the war, we built another 26. After the war, construction slowed down for a few years, but then in 1955 it picked up again and we've been building them pretty consistently ever since. We currently have eleven aircraft carriers. At a million dollars a day each, it's costing the average American family of four about a dollar a week to keep them all running.

I haven't figured out how to get the date to display across the bottom of the above chart, so I made up a little table to show the corresponding dates.


Correspondence of Days & Dates


Via daily timewaster

More aircraft carrier posts here.

Dinosaurs

Milky Way Rotation

Never thought of it that way before. Kind of puts the invention of lignin (360 million years ago) and the development of lignin eating bacteria (300 million years ago) in perspective.

If the Milky was actually rotating, you might think that all the stars in the Milky Way would just head off into the great beyond. Pictures of spiral arm galaxies sure look like they are rotating, though I can never decide whether they are winding up the spiral arms (clockwise in the above picture) or flying apart (counter-clockwise). But then there is gravity. Hard to believe that it could exert any noticeable force over a distance of 25,000 light years.

All of which got me to wondering how fast the Sun is traveling, so off to the spreadsheet.


Satellites in low earth orbit, like the International Space Station, travel around 5 miles per second. The earth is traveling around the sun at 19 miles per second, so the sun traveling at 130 miles per second has got the hammer down. Except all our neighbors are going the same way at the same rate. Except for Barnard's Star, which is hustling along at 57 miles per second relative to the sun, going who knows where.

Via dad's deadpool blog

Whirligigs

Big

Helicopter De-icing Wind Turbine Blades

I like this picture because it shows just how big a wind turbine is. It's hard to show how big they are because there is never anything around them that you can use for comparison. A picture with a person doesn't work because by the time you zoom out far enough to get the whole turbine in the picture, the person is reduced to a single pixel, which doesn't really help.

Some people think this picture indicates that wind turbines are stupid. Time will tell. The rapid proliferation of wind turbines is due to government policy in the form of tax benefits. It's kind of like ethanol (from corn) that way. It might not be the most economical way to produce electricity, but it's a worthwhile experiment. Even with the vast numbers of them being installed, they still don't produce a noticeable percentage of the electricity we use.

The problem with icing might be due to the get-er-done mindset which ignored the possibility of ice being a problem. Or maybe they considered it, and de-icing by helicopter is the most economical solution. Or maybe it's a freak occurrence that wasn't worth worrying about, until it was.

Small


F2A World Record - Control-line model aircraft speed.
Raddaddy watanen comments:

Some facts for you fellas: Only one-inboard wing, as the drag of the 2 lines are the biggest drag factor. One line is forbidden by the rules (monoline) also longer than 1 m wings outruled. Engine turns at about 40.000 rpm so the two blade prop is ineffective ( other blade falls in the slipstream of the other). The one blade prop tip travels in excess of sound of speed (Tip speed is +1MACH!) and the counterweight is inside the spinner. The 2,5cc glo engine delivers more than 2,5 horsepower. so if it would be a 2,5 litre car engine, the power would be 2500 horsepower. Now you MAY understand these "toys" are actually VERY HIGH TECH scale racers...

Could the engine really be turning 40,000 RPM? That's pretty fast. It is very small. I ran the numbers just to see, and it seems reasonable. 800 MPH is a little more than Mach 1.


I had a couple of control-line model aircraft when I was a kid. Only flew them once or twice. Not sure why. Perhaps it was too big a production for such a small person.

Via True Blue Sam the Travelin' Man

Update July 2021 replaced missing image.

Genesis Ether Mining

Building a Cryptocurrency Mining Farm / Genesis Mining #EvolveWithUs - The Series Episode 2
I put $120 into Genesis Ether Mining a couple of months ago. I've been checking periodically to see if it had produced any results, but nothing has shown up. They seem to be a new outfit that is having normal start-up problems, so I cut them some slack, but like I said, it's been a couple of months so I inquired, and now I have some numbers. Since they sat on my money for a month to ensure that it was legit and not from some scammer, the money has only been at work for a month, but in a month it has produced $5.38. Theoretically speaking. To actually get the money, I have to transfer it to an electronic 'wallet', and from there I should be able to get actual moola.

I dutifully set up the wallet, but nothing had gotten transferred. Seems there are transaction fees, so Genesis doesn't transfer any funds until you have at least $15 to transfer.

Anyway, $5 a month times 12 months is $60, so in two years I should double my money. Assuming of course that this whole thing doesn't collapse like the house of cards it is.


The numbers on the Genesis website don't give you the total, so I copied the numbers (no, I didn't copy them down by hand, I used a mouse to highlight the data and then used Ctrl-C to copy them) and then pasted them in a Google spreadsheet and then used the sum function to add the numbers up.

Had a bit of a problem with the dates. Genesis, being in Iceland uses a European date format: day, month, year, which might be fine in Iceland, but it doesn't cut it in my little corner of the world. So I fussed and farted and looked in the help, but nothing seemed to work, so I ended up writing a nasty little function to take apart the old date and then put it back together the way I wanted it, something like:

=concatenate(mid(A6,4,2),"-",left(A6,2),"-",right(A6,4))

When I was done, I was going to go back tell them that one of their supplied solutions didn't work, but this time I found an answer that said date and time formats depended on location, and I didn't want to open that can of worms, so I stopped.

Genesis Mining website

Update an hour later. Replace picture of cool computer with Genesis video because it has a view of their campus.

Geek Out

Stand-up comedy routine about Spreadsheets

Published on Jan 4, 2016

Matt Parker’s comedy routine about spreadsheets. From the Festival of the Spoken Nerd DVD: Full Frontal Nerdity

Buy Full Frontal Nerdity as a DVD or Download:

http://shop.festivalofthespokennerd.com/

See where Festival of the Spoken Nerd are performing live: [England]

http://festivalofthespokennerd.com/bu...

Convert your own image spreadsheet!

http://think-maths.co.uk/spreadsheet

Buy Matt’s book!

http://makeanddo4d.com/

Think Maths: mathematics talks, workshops and free resources

http://think-maths.co.uk/

MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician

Website: http://standupmaths.com/

I tried it out on a picture of Lana Del Rey. 

Google Docs doesn't have the zoom feature of Excel (or I don't know how to use it), so I didn't get the whole image on the screen at once. But I did capture part of it.

Via Dennis.

Stirling City, California

Diamond Match Sawmill, Stirling City, California, 1912

Stirling City, California, is a place in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. There was a loop (which terminates a winding spur line) of the Southern Pacific Railroad there, built to collect lumber from the Lassen National Forest. It came into being when the Diamond Match Company built a sawmill there back in 1903. It got its name from the boiler used at the company's Barber plant, made by the Stirling Boiler Company. Stirling Boiler is now a division of Babcock-Wilcox. The sawmill closed in the early 1970s. The land surrounding Stirling City is still harvested for timber. Barber, a suburb of Chico, was named for the founder of Diamond Match. - Extracted from Wikipedia

The Stirling City Museum has a collection of photos of early lumbering operations, including the Shay locomotives that were used on the 'winding spur line'. Click on FS in the lower right corner of the gray frame to see the pictures at full size.

10,000 board feet per day does not sound like enough to justify building a railroad line and a sawmill. Ten good sized logs would be sufficient for that. But lumber is always in demand, so perhaps Barber was branching out and this branching out just happened to ensure him with a supply of wood for his match factories.

Inspired by an email from Posthip Scott, who is "in the wilds of Magalia, out of  Paradise, out of Chico.  Not really near anything except Stirling City, onetime home to the Diamond Match Company. . . The internet connection up here is a slow version of dial-up, which is another impediment."

I've heard rumors of dial-up connections, but I didn't think anyone really had one.

Update January 2021 replaced missing picture